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As Anthony points out, Google is now suing Apple over patents that it says are owned by the newly acquired Motorola Mobility. Given that we are rapidly reaching the lawsuit horizon, where everybody has or is suing everyone else, we might actually end up with a sensible clarification of the law on what patents are actually valid and how. We certainly need this to happen, for there to be a sorting out.

We've Apple suing Samsung in certain parts of the world over design patents: essentially concerning the look and feel of products, not the specific manner in which they work. Apple has managed to get certain Samsung products banned from sale in certain territories, failed in others. We've Samsung suing Apple in the US over certain standards essential patents. Effectively Apple says that as Samsung won't license them on the agreed reasonable and non-discriminatory terms then Apple ain't gonna pay nuttin' No Sir!

Motorola has already sued Apple over similar standards based patents. Now the new suit is over non=essential patents. As Anthony says, this is significantly different:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google/Motorola is alleging that Apple has infringed on seven of its patents, none of which are standard-essential. This distinction is important. As FOSS Patents explains, “The announcement comes six days before the target date for a final decision on the ITC investigation of Motorola’s first ITC complaint against Apple (July 23). A preliminary ruling by an ITC judge held Apple to infringe only one of Motorola’s asserted patents, which is a standard-essential one that raises competition issues and is, therefore, less likely to result in an actual import ban.”

If a patent is deemed to be “essential” to an “industry standard,” then, as Tim Cook told Walt Mossberg, there is just “an economic argument” about how much licensees have to pay the patent holder, but courts rarely grant injunctions for standard-essential patents.

On non-essential patents import bans can be and indeed are sometimes enforced. Indeed, Apple is asking for such a ban on Samsung products. And Google is asking for such a ban on Apple products. Just for those who don't know this, Samsung's products run Google's Android operating system which brings us full circle in this group suing each other.

The thing that interests me most in all of this though is how much it has cost Google to be able to do this. The headline price for Motorola Mobility was $12.5 billion. Which we might think is a pretty high price to pay for a loss making handset maker and a few patents. Even the ability to entirely nail Apple (if they can) is expensive at that price. However, as it was pointed out to me when they made the purchase, that's not actually the real price to Google of this wonderful opportunity to attack Apple. That's more like $3.8 billion.

For Motorola had a series of accumulated tax losses which can be set against future Google profits. Thus lowering considerably the real as opposed to headline costs.

Plus, of course, there's the potential to collect royalties on these patents being asserted (assuming they are successfully so asserted) and the opportunity to nail Apple seems to come almost for free. At least, in this rarefied world of large telecoms companies, where a $billion here or there seems to be a rounding error.

As I noted at the start my main hope is that once everyone has sued everyone, all the appeals courts have had their say, then the law on patents, who can do what with them, should be much clearer. That's what we all might get out of it of course. But along the way we might get some interesting diversions: for example, it's actually possible that Apple won't get Samsung kit banned from the US but Google might get Apple kit so banned. And wouldn't that be fun? Very much the biter bit that would be.